As the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court heard the arguments of attorneys on either side of two cases that will determine if the birth control benefit in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will be permitted to stand as currently constructed, advocates for and against rallied in front of the Court.

On one side of the vast plaza in front of the Court building, anti-choice forces massed, some bearing signs featuring photographs of bloody fetuses, and insisting that birth control and abortion are the same thing. Dominating the protest visuals of the pro-Hobby Lobby crowd were the red sashes of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), the far-right Catholic group whose founder has called the Spanish Inquisition, during which accused heretics were tortured to death, “a glorious moment” for the church.

On the other, some 40 progressive groups came together in coalition to support the contraception benefit, the dominant color being the pink stocking caps and t-shirts of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which co-sponsored the rally together with the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Women’s Law Center, and NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Snow fell throughout the morning, soaking the rally-goers, who remained undaunted and energetic. Signs on the reproductive justice side of the plaza offered an array of messages:

“If Men Could Get Pregnant, Birth Control Would Be From Gumball Machines and Bacon-Flavored”

“Keep Your Hobbies Off My Ovaries”

“Bigotry Disguised as Religious Liberty Is Still Bigotry”

On the side of the plaza where the Hobby Lobby supporters gathered, the TFP contingent unfurled a banner that read, “God’s Law Comes First. Repeal Socialist Obamacare!” A man on the sidewalk in front of them propped up a homemade poster emblazoned with a swastika, a photo of President Barack Obama wearing a crown, the words “Tyranny” and “You Will Pay,” together with a photo of a bloody fetus in one corner.

At the progressive rally, dubbed “Not My Boss’s Business,” Kimberly Inez McGuire, director of public affairs for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH), and Carol McDonald, director of strategic partnerships for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, led the crowd in spirited chants, such as: “Let it snow, we won’t go! Bosses in the bedroom got to go!” and “What do we want? Birth control! When do we want it? Always!” McGuire also led chants in Spanish, and McDonald emceed the rally.

Organizers read a statement they said was from an employee of Hobby Lobby who wished to remain anonymous, fearing for her job. “We are a single-income family and if I were to lose my job over something like this we would probably be on the streets,” the statement reads. The writer explained:

Birth control coverage should be important for everyone, not just women. … without birth control, I could have been pregnant a lot sooner than I would have liked … This is a very significant thing in my opinion and I think it should be readily available for any woman that wants to take responsibility of her life.

McDonald told a bit of her own story, explaining that she was born to a teen mother. “And the one lesson that I heard over and over, when I was a teenager and I was comin’ up, was, ‘Wait until you’re ready to have your children,’” McDonald said. “And I waited until I was 37. And that decision—for me to wait until I was ready? That helped me to break the cycle of poverty in my family.”

Jamila Perritt, medical director at the Planned Parenthood affiliate of Metropolitan D.C., told the story of one of her patients, a single mother with a full-time job who was attending school at night. Her patient was “trying to do the right thing,” Perritt said, by coming to the clinic for birth control. “But upon hearing of the cost of the only method that was medically safe for her, she burst into tears,” Perritt said. “She could not afford it. There was no way—not with everything else on her plate.”

As anti-choice protesters caught sight of Perritt in her white doctor’s coat on the podium, they moved in behind her, hoisting giant, gruesome posters of a bloody fetus, and remained after she left the microphone. McDonald urged the crowd to ignore them, as rally-goers attempted to raise their own signs and banners to block out the
intruders.

Also represented among the speakers at the progressive rally were officials from the labor movement and LGBT organizations, including Hector Sanchez, chair of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda and executive director of Labor Council for Latin American Advancement; Sarah Warbelow, state legislative director of the Human Rights Campaign; and Rev. Darlene Nipper, deputy director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

“Today we come together to push back the latest desperate effort by extremists to control our freedom, to control our bodies, and our health-care choices,” Nipper told the cheering crowd. “The fanatical right is always wrong. In this instance, they’re stooping even lower than usual. They’re cynically using religion and people of faith to justify their almost rabid hatred of women, Obamacare and, ultimately, real freedom.”

Dorothy Roberts, professor of law and sociology at University of Pennsylvania and board chair of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, spoke to the disproportionate impact of barriers to birth control aspect of women of color and others. “We found that when access to health care is denied, it’s the most marginalized women in this country and around the world who suffer the most—women of color, poor and low-wage workers, lesbian and trans women, women with disabilities,” said Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty. “And this case has far-reaching consequences for their equal rights. Birth control is good health care, period.”

Testimonials were offered, as well, by several college students, doctors and nurses, and religious leaders. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) stepped up for a minute to state her appreciation for the creative messaging of the rally-goers’ signs, and to promise to “continue this fight until it’s won.”

“[W]e are the 99 percent, we are intersectional,” McDonald told the crowd. “This is what democracy looks like.”

All pictures used in the slideshow below were taken by Adele M. Stan. Hover over any picture to see its caption:

The Liberty Institute, a Christian conservative legal advocacy organization, claims an anti-choice doctor's religious liberty was threatened by the West Virginia University School of Medicine when he allegedly received a letter of reprimand for his anti-choice activism.

The Liberty Institute has threatened to file a lawsuit against the West Virginia University (WVU) School of Medicine if the school does not withdraw a reprimand of Dr. Byron Calhoun. The Christian conservative legal advocacy organization alleges that WVU threatened Calhoun with a written reprimand for his anti-choice activism.

In a press release Wednesday, Libertysaid Calhoun was “threatened with a written, professional reprimand from the University” after he received negative media attention for his anti-choice activism, including writing a complaint to the West Virginia attorney general about a nurse-midwife, which was later dismissed by West Virginia Board of Examiners for Registered Professional Nurses.

The Charleston Daily Mail reports that WVU disputes the claims and characterizations made by Liberty. The school’s director of public affairs, Amy Johns, told the paper that “events did not occur as characterized in the release from Liberty Institute.” Johns further said that she could make no other comment “because this is a personnel matter.”

Some may know him as the “idiot on the field,” after a highly publicized jaunt on the field during the World Series, complete with an anti-abortion poster with “vote Romney/Ryan” on one side. But Rives Grogan is more than just a one-time protester, he’s an anti-choice minister determined to use public events to get President Barack Obama to allegedly answer for his support for a woman’s right to choose.

Grogan’s latest disturbance is a dramatic heckling of the president at a rally in Lima, Ohio, where he was dragged out of the balcony for yelling during the President’s speech, and displaying graphic images on a poster from the balcony.

“Stop Obama,” he shouted as he was removed from the venue by security, according to the Lima local news. “Make Obama answer the questions. All the lies of Benghazi. Four Americans are dead because of the lies of Benghazi. Abortion, 3,000 babies die every day because of abortion.”

That’s just the more recent escapade, however. In June, Grogan was arrested for disrupting the Senate when he broke in to shout anti-choice rhetoric, as well as praise for Senator John McCain. Twice in the previous six years he has been arrested for yelling during Supreme Court hearings. In October, he even heckled Pat Robertson at a values voters conference.

In fact, Grogan has an extensive arrest record, most of which involves breaking into restricted access areas in the Capitol, according to Roll Call, especially during the ramp up to the Congressional battle over reproductive care funding. Instead, it seems that he has put that zeal into protesting at campaign functions leading up to election day.

With so much attention at the Democratic National Convention focused on reproductive rights this week, it’s no wonder that the presence of anti-choice protesters makes for easy “balanced” journalism. There is an endless stream of eager activists ready to provide the contrast for any article being written about the event, and some reporters anxious to find a place where both sides could “agree” on issues may have fallen prey to hearing what they wanted to hear to advance their own storyline.

Operation Save America’s Flip Benham allegedly was able to find “common ground” with delegates and their guests, agreeing that the GOP doesn’t follow through on their promise to support “life” if they refuse to assist parents in finding food, health care, and other daily necessities after those babies are born.

“If you believe we should have kids you cannot support public policy that doesn’t help them when they’re here,” [Rev. Leanda Marshall] said when asked why she supports the Democratic Party

“You may not kill them before birth, but the Republican policies suck the life out of them once they are alive.”

The assumption is of course that Benham believes the government needs to be reformed to better assist those who give birth to children they cannot support. But that assumption is probably wrong, if an interview with another protester is any indication. The American Prospect learned first hand that anti-choice advocates’ interest in the well-being of a child ends directly after its birth.

What if someone said, “We will limit abortion and even outlaw it, but in exchange, we have to have universal health care, universal pre-K, government-funded contraception?”

No, one has nothing to do with the other. This is a moral issue, period. This whole free health care stuff is socialism and communism. It doesn’t work, it’s not going to work, and the Founders would be vehemently opposed to this stuff.

And well, [contraception] encourages sin and fornication. Have sex when you get married, and start a family as God intended.

Take away easier access to birth control then force you to give birth but then leave you with no resources with which to raise a child? No wonder so many people are concerned about reproductive rights this election cycle.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/09/06/do-anti-choice-protesters-at-dnc-care-about-baby-after-its-born/feed/4The Mask of Concern Slips from the Anti-Choicers Facehttp://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/05/30/mask-concern-slips-antichoice-face/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mask-concern-slips-antichoice-face
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/05/30/mask-concern-slips-antichoice-face/#commentsMon, 30 May 2011 17:13:15 +0000Anti-choice activists have an interest in appearing to care about women, but recent events demonstrate that it's increasingly hard to keep up the facade.

]]>The cracks in the armor were always showing, but lately they’ve been getting bigger. Anti-choicers, aware that blatant misogyny isn’t as popular as it was in the days they long to return to, and so they’ve put a lot of effort into pretending to care about women’s well-being. Granted, they do so by relying on misogyny—the argument behind their “caring” is that women are literally too stupid to know what abortion is and too morally incompetent to be trusted with their own decisions—but it is true that a misogyny that paints women as overgrown children instead of as evil slatterns is slightly more palatable to the public at large. But this armor of “we take women’s rights because we care!” has been falling apart in the recent misogynist frenzy on the right. It turns out it wasn’t so much an “armor” as a tattered quilt wrapped up like a toga and wielded by people who can delude themselves into thinking it’s steel.

What would it look like if anti-choicers, as they claimed, didn’t hate women but instead were looking out for women and for children? Nothing like it looks now.

Instead, now you have an unfortunate series of anti-choice politicians acting like rape is no big deal, and that being forced to carry a rapist’s baby is no more trouble than changing a tire. In Louisiana, anti-choice legislators completely abandoned the pretense that abortion bans are about protecting women, and instead prescribed jail time for women who get abortions. Guess they didn’t get the memo from anti-choice South Dakota legislator Roger Hunt, who claims all women get abortions because they’re coerced.

But for my money, the most interesting example of the mask slipping was when Jill Stanek went on one of her obsessive crusades, this time against a woman who had lost a wanted pregnancy and who nearly lost her life. Mikki Kendall wrote a harrowing piece in Salon about how anti-choice sentiment and policies nearly led to her death when she was admitted to a hospital where the doctors wouldn’t terminate her miscarrying pregnancy because they were anti-choice. Luckily, a non-misogynist nurse took pity on her and called in a non-misogynist doctor to save her life.

Stanek’s response to all this was basically to call Kendall a liar. It was all projection of course—since Stanek herself has no love of the truth, she assumes everyone else is as quick to tell lies as she is. But it wasn’t just that she so readily calls a woman who has gone through such an experience a liar. Stanek’s tone revealed her gleeful misogyny, her love of having any excuse to bash and hector women who aren’t herself. A quote from her rampage of hate:

Name the hospital, Mikki. Name the doctor. Show me the charting.

You may really believe your story, Mikki, but it is fiction, and the editors of Salon were irresponsible to print it.

I particularly like Stanek’s quick assumption that other people are as apt to flights of delusion and fantasy as she is, and that Kendall just imagined everything that happened to her. Stanek went on and on in the comments on the article, abusing Kendall and making claims that she knew better than Kendall what her medical history says. Stanek justified this by claiming to be a nurse, without noting that she had been fired from her hospital job over a decade ago because she kept running to the media with lurid, false tales that the doctors and patients were collaborating to kill babies (babies that were born, not fetuses) in the hospital.

Of course, even when anti-choicers suck it up and try to pretend like they care about women, they do a poor job of it. Anti-choicers tend to pass around lists of what they claim are the negative effects on women of abortion (which are invariably disproved by real science), but their reaction to these beliefs doesn’t resemble how you would actually react if you believed these things and were concerned about women.

For instance, anti-choicers claim to believe that abortion causes mental health problems in women. There is no scientific evidence for this, of course, but if you did really believe that and were concerned about women, you wouldn’t react by wanting to drive abortion underground, where the mental health effects would be compounded. You would instead demand free contraception for all, comprehensive sex education, of course. But more than that, you would be demanding research to make sure the correlation that you claim exists is causal, or if it’s reflecting something else. If you cared about women’s mental health, you would demand federal funding for family planning clinics to do mental health screenings. If you cared about women’s mental health, you would worry about the scientifically established link between giving birth and developing mental illness. Instead, we get crickets from anti-choicers.

Same story with the feigned concern that anti-choicers have when it comes to breast cancer. There is no link between abortion and breast cancer, but anti-choicers claim to believe in it. But for all their supposed concern about breast cancer, their interest in preventing and treating the disease is limited to making false claims about abortion. Sincere concern for breast cancer would lead to demands for a massive federal program to make mammograms available in every family planning clinic and grocery store. It would lead to demands for more research into the causes of breast cancer (instead of spending money on another abortion-breast cancer study that will once again show no link). Instead of screaming “baby killer” at women going into abortion clinics, anti-choicers would spend their weekends conducting breast examination classes for women. That’s what caring about women looks like.

Let’s hope that the constantly slipping mask of feigned concern for women’s well-being continues its slide off the anti-choice face. As distressing as it can be to hear the overt misogyny of rape apologist legislators and the vicious trolling of Jill Stanek, it at least shows the anti-choice movement for what it really is: organized anti-feminism based around the belief that women don’t deserve their full human rights.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/05/30/mask-concern-slips-antichoice-face/feed/153STOKING FIRE: Fame Comes with Anti-Choice Shifthttp://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/04/06/stoking-fire-fame-comes-antichoice-shift/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=stoking-fire-fame-comes-antichoice-shift
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/04/06/stoking-fire-fame-comes-antichoice-shift/#commentsWed, 06 Apr 2011 20:46:01 +0000“When they go from pro-choice to anti-choice they’re following a redemptive paradigm. They see themselves transformed from sinners to saints. The opposite doesn’t have the same cache.”

]]>This Easter, 31-year-old Abigail Seidman will take communion as a Roman Catholic for the first time. Taken alone, this is hardly earth shaking. But Seidman is no ordinary convert. Seidman is the daughter of a former nurse at the Toledo, Ohio Center for Choice, the latest former-feminist to take center stage as an anti-choice activist.

Whether on YouTube, through audio files, or in interviews with conservative columnist Jill Stanek, Seidman trucks out every imaginable cliché to stoke anti-abortion/anti-feminist fervor. Among her more Onion-esque assertions:

The Center for Choice was filled with occult imagery and staff routinely engaged in Wiccan practices, even piping “Goddess chants” into the recovery room;

Abortions were performed on women who were not pregnant and staff encouraged one another to conceive so they could have at least one surgery. “You had to have an abortion,” she says. “That was the initiation that everyone shared.”

What’s more, Seidman charges that medical records were altered to allow doctors to operate past legal limits. Worse, she reports that staff—AKA witches—regularly smoked pot and took hallucinogenic drugs during the workday.

And then Seidman gets personal. As she tells it, her mom put her on the pill at age 11. According to Jill Stanek, “Rape was a particular obsession of her mom’s and the feminist mantra, ‘Every man is a potential rapist,’ was frequently repeated.”

Of course, men-as-enemies was just the start of Seidman’s purported indoctrination. Her preposterous claims include the assertion that her mom forced her to have an abortion when she became pregnant at 18, declaring, “You’re part of the sisterhood now,” once the procedure was completed.

Other coming-of-age indignities—these resonate particularly well with her new circle of friends–involve religious oppression. “Until I was five my parents went to church. I loved God,” she says in an audio interview. “My grandfather was a devout Baptist. As my mom became a feminist I was cut off from him and we isolated ourselves from Christians.”

Her own abortion, she continues, caused tremendous grief, and Seidman tells any-and-all that, before becoming a believer, each anniversary was marked by despair. “I’d been to counseling and was on anti-depressant drugs but nothing was working. When I went online all the post-abortion sites said that healing begins with Jesus. I thought to myself, ‘Jesus won’t accept me,’ but I bought a Bible anyway and started reading. One afternoon I prayed, ‘If you’re out there and if I’m acceptable to you, I will accept you.’ I instantly felt something—a strange feeling… There’s no forgiveness in atheism. The things you do just stack up.”

Seidman’s heartfelt testimony puts her alongside a handful of other anti-choice turncoats, people who have gained fame, and perhaps fortune, by switching sides. Among the most prominent: Norma McCorvey [the original Jane Roe], the late Dr. Bernard Nathanson [a NARAL founder], and Abby Johnson [former Director of a Texas Planned Parenthood affiliate].

It should come as no surprise that people familiar with the Center for Choice during the years that Seidman’s mom worked there [early-to-mid 1990’s] are eager to rebut Abigail’s outlandish claims. Dr. Jeannie Ludlow, a patient advocate from 1996 to 2008, says that the clinic “often sent people from Ohio to Kansas, to Dr. Tiller’s clinic. We wouldn’t have done this if we were willing to go over the legal [time] limit.”

Similarly, Rachelle Lerch, on staff since 1991, says that, “ We’ve always sent patients away to think about the decision when we don’t think they’re ready to have an abortion. We give them a workbook and contact them a few days later to discuss what they want to do.”

Seidman’s derision of the Center angers and saddens both Lerch and Ludlow. At the same time they wonder about the psychological underpinnings of her Rightwing ascension. They’ve also begun to question why antis who become pro-choice are not heralded in the same way as those moving from pro to anti-choice, especially since this shift happens with shocking regularity.

Indeed, clinicians across the U.S. report that anti-choicers often change sides when they, or someone they love, needs an abortion. Sometimes, they even write letters to the people they’ve harassed. “As a child I believed abortion was a black/white issue. Because of my naiveté, not to mention the influence of a Catholic school, I protested at your clinic. I am ashamed that I once treated people so harshly,” wrote MK to the Allentown’s Women’s Center.

According to Vicki Saporta, President and CEO of the National Abortion Federation, “Some anti-abortion patients think of themselves as different from other women and go right back out to protest against the clinic after their surgery. Others will apologize for making life miserable for patients and staff, saying that when they needed an abortion they were amazed by the compassion they were shown. These people typically admit that they have new respect for the women obtaining reproductive healthcare and the women providing it.”

Nonetheless, Saporta concedes that she can remember only one instance in which a person going from anti to pro-choice was given media attention. “We don’t spend a single minute trying to recruit people to our position,” she says, “Clinicians focus on care-giving.”

That said, anti-abortion stigma clearly contributes to silencing former antis. Merle Hoffman, founder/President of Choices Women’s Medical Center, quips: “When they go from pro-choice to anti-choice they’re following a redemptive paradigm. They see themselves transformed from sinners to saints. The opposite doesn’t have the same cache.”

True enough.

The task then, is to shift the paradigm: After all, pro-choice is pro-life.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/04/06/stoking-fire-fame-comes-antichoice-shift/feed/46Anti-Choice Forces Adopt In-Your-Face Tactics and the Danger to Women is Realhttp://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/03/14/antiabortion-forces-adopt-inyourface-tactics-danger-women-real/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=antiabortion-forces-adopt-inyourface-tactics-danger-women-real
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/03/14/antiabortion-forces-adopt-inyourface-tactics-danger-women-real/#commentsMon, 14 Mar 2011 12:38:41 +0000In Wichita, threats have resulted in a doctor agreeing not to provide abortion care. But the proper response is to stop the extremist behavior creating the terror, not try to shut down a doctor seeking to provide legal medical care.

]]>If there are any lingering doubts about the danger anti-choice activists’ recent in-your-face tactics (from slashing funding for federal family planning programs to legalizing the killing of abortion providers) really pose to women’s access to reproductive health services, those doubts should evaporate after a close look at the latest developments in Wichita, Kansas. Recently, Dr. Mila Means, a Wichita family practitioner agreed not to offer abortion services at the office building she leases after her landlord filed a lawsuit against her to block her from providing abortion. The agreement delays any further proceedings on the lawsuit, but will resume should she change her mind. When the suit was filed the landlord argued that anti-choice protest activities would create “a clear nuisance” and disturb the “peaceful possession” of other tenants. A judge subsequently blocked Dr. Means from providing abortion or making any changes to the facility that would allow her to do so. Given the extreme and sometimes violent nature of anti-abortion activism, it’s hard to argue that the landlord shouldn’t have been concerned, but deferring to the folks employing threatening and intimidating tactics is a lot like telling a child he can’t go to school because a bully might beat him up.

And in this instance, the bullies are winning. Dr. Means originally planned to provide abortion services in Wichita to fill the void left after the 2009 murder of Dr. George Tiller. Dr. Tiller was gunned down by a self-proclaimed anti-choice activist who sought to stop him from providing abortion services. Scott Roeder is now serving a life sentence in prison for that crime, and for the time being, he and abortion opponents have achieved their goal of preventing women from obtaining abortions in Wichita.

Unfortunately the situation in Wichita is not novel. The Center for Reproductive Rights’ conducted research that found that abortion providers operate under siege on a daily basis. Persistent harassment including violence, threats, and intimidation of abortion providers and women seeking services, deter new doctors from entering the field and force skilled physicians out. Not only are women harassed when they seek services, they potentially face loss of their constitutionally protected right to abortion services when doctors are intimidated or forced to stop providing services. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the number of abortion providers nationwide has declined by 25% since the 1990s. Currently, more than a third of women of reproductive age live in counties without an abortion provider. Kansas—headquarters to the virulently anti-choice organization Operation Rescue—has lost four abortion providers, including Dr. Tiller, in the past six years.

Prior to the lawsuit against Dr. Means, anti-abortion activists held “vigils” outside the building where her office is located, even though she had not started to offer abortion services. According to papers filed with the court, the police department was asked to inspect a “suspicious package,” and three other businesses indicated that they intend to vacate the office building because of concerns about safety issues and the nuisance of daily protests. Operation Rescue promised to target Dr. Means’ office, and the Kansas Coalition for Life vowed, “It will be a circus out there.” Unsurprisingly, Dr. Means hired a full time security guard.

The landlord and other tenants have every right to be upset when anti-abortion groups threaten to terrorize Dr. Means’ patients and their customers, but the proper response is to stop the extremist behavior creating the terror, and not try to shut down a doctor seeking to provide legal medical care. After all, there are legal restrictions on anti-abortion activities to help protect clinics and providers. In addition to the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, there are also state and local laws, including permit and noise restrictions and buffer zones that can decrease the level, aggression and disruption caused by anti-choice protests. The landlord and neighboring businesses should encourage and support full enforcement of these laws by the local authorities. If enforcement of existing legal protections proves to be inadequate, communities and police departments can work together to pass additional restrictions on extreme protest activities and to protect health providers and patients from harassment and threats. Anti- abortion activists will continue employing extreme, threatening tactics as long as they are successful. It’s time for communities to stop cowering in the face of their threats and to stand up to them.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/03/14/antiabortion-forces-adopt-inyourface-tactics-danger-women-real/feed/1‘Abortion’ as Right’s Multipurpose Scare Wordhttp://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2010/11/18/abortion-rights-multipurpose-scare-word/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=abortion-rights-multipurpose-scare-word
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2010/11/18/abortion-rights-multipurpose-scare-word/#commentsThu, 18 Nov 2010 22:18:49 +0000For social conservatives, abortion has now become a catch-all term for anything threatening, particularly if it relates to feminist politics: contraception, women's rights in general, even economic and social policies they disapprove of, such as health care reform.

Abortion: most of us tend to think the word has a fixed meaning, which is: terminating a pregnancy through the use of drugs or surgery. There’s also the medical term “spontaneous abortion,” used to describe what most people euphemistically call a “miscarriage.” Unfortunately, many in the mainstream media don’t realize yet that when social conservatives invoke the dreaded A-word, they may not be talking about the termination of a pregnancy. Confusion therefore ensues. That’s because, for social conservatives, abortion has now become a catch-all term for anything threatening, particularly if it relates to feminist politics: the list extends to contraception, women’s rights in general, even economic and social policies they disapprove of, such as health care reform.

“Abortion” is a great scare term, so reliable both for making mainstream pundits squirm and right wing troops turn out, that social conservatives can’t help but give in to the temptation to apply it even in situations where there are no pregnancy terminations in sight. A friend of mine who must remain anonymous had a recent run-in with this new, expanded conservative definition of “abortion.” While doing research, she attended an anti-abortion conference, and while most of the speakers stuck to the actual topic at hand—terminating pregnancies and how they’re against that—one speaker in particular stuck out. He was a professor at a Catholic university and an adamant anti-feminist. For much of his speech, he ranted about his belief that women troll bars looking for guys to impregnate them during one-night stands, so that the women can later sue for child support, which the professor believed usually amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars, a kind of sperm-based lottery. Unsurprisingly, he was opposed to this practice, even though it mostly exists in his vivid imagination.

As my friend told me this story, I piped up and said, “He was saying these things at an anti-abortion conference? Doesn’t he realize that women who get abortions also terminate their rights to sue their impregnators for child support?” She laughed, and agreed that in reality-based terms, this indeed seemed the contradiction. But in the emotional landscape of an anti-feminist, it all makes sense. Abortion is a woman’s right and suing for child support is a right of custodial parents (usually women). Therefore, it’s no big thing to equate child support with abortion, even though there would, in the real world, be fewer abortions if child support was more readily available.

The process of expanding the word “abortion” to mean whatever people on the right wish it to mean started in a predictable place, with contraception. The anti-choice movement, rooted as it often is in religious ideas about gender and sexuality, doesn’t feel much warmer about contraception than it does about abortion. Unfortunately, to sell their views to a larger public, they’ve focused on their contention that abortion ends a life — and since contraception does no such thing, they’re facing a real PR struggle when it comes to opposing birth control.

The solution? Call contraception “abortion,” and attack it from that angle.

Making Contraception Equal ‘Abortion’

This has been the strategy behind attacks on female-controlled hormonal contraception, such as the birth control pill, “the ring,” hormonal shots and emergency contraception, as well as on the highly effective female-controlled intrauterine device, or IUD. According to right wing propaganda, hormonal contraception works by causing a woman’s body to reject fertilized eggs, which they argue means you’ve terminated a pregnancy that never even started by any real world medical standard. (In reality, hormonal contraception works by suppressing ovulation, which means that women on the pill release fewer eggs — in most cases, none — which can be fertilized. And because, in the normal course of things, many fertilized eggs die naturally — this actually means that far fewer fertilized eggs will die in the bodies of women on hormonal birth control than in the bodies of women who are not using any contraception.)

We can demand a world where ‘abortion’ has no stigma

Under the Bush administration, the unscientific equation of terminating a pregnancy with preventing a pregnancy allowed the Christian Right-controlled FDA to delay approving emergency contraception for over-the-counter sales for years. Currently, anti-choice forces are testing the electoral possibilities of “personhood” amendments, such as Prop 62 in Colorado. These amendments declare fertilized eggs to be full human beings with full rights. If passed, such amendments would certainly have implications for legal abortion, but could also impact female-controlled contraception. Opponents of birth control hope that if the pill can be portrayed as “abortion,” personhood amendments could be used to present legal challenges to use of the pill, with possible criminal penalties for women who take it.

Personhood amendments tend to fail on their own grounds–Colorado voters just rejected one such amendment by a large margin. The public isn’t ready to believe that an eight-celled embryo is the same as a kindergartener, but the tactic has managed to sow public confusion about what abortion actually is. Now it’s quite common to hear even rabid pro-choicers accept that the birth control pill kills something besides the hormone fluctuations that cause ovulation. Those of us who know both the science and the politics behind this find ourselves trying to put out two fires, trying to argue that fertilized eggs aren’t people — and also that you can’t have an “abortion” when you aren’t even pregnant.

Women’s History As ‘Abortion’

Conservatives have been so successful with labeling contraception “abortion” that they’ve moved on to expanding the definition of “abortion” to include any support for women’s liberation and equality. Senators Tom Coburn and Jim DeMintrecently levied questionable legal arguments along with their not-inconsiderable power to stop the National Women’s History Museum, a private organization, from buying land to build the museum. One reason was that a group called Concerned Women for America wrote the senators complaining that the museum would “focus on abortion rights.”

It’s hard to buy the argument that love of fetal life has anything to do with their opposition: Not only would the museum, being a museum, not be providing abortions, the CEO of the museum has made it clear that there wouldn’t even be an exhibit on the reproductive rights movement. The objection to the museum is clearly due to the fact that it celebrates women, women’s work and women’s right to equality. It’s hard for DeMint, Coburn, or the CWA to openly object to women’s equality, so they simply label equality “abortion,” and bank on the stigma that word carries.

During the battle over health care reform, conservatives found that flinging the word “abortion” around gave them a great deal of power, and it nearly killed the bill. In order to get it passed, in fact, President Obama had to sign an executive order that made it nearly impossible for insurance companies to cover abortion, the actual medical procedure. But despite the fact that anti-abortion Democrats were in the forefront of this campaign to reduce women’s access to abortion coverage, social conservatives have dumped enormous amounts of money into this year’s campaigns against Democratic candidates, claiming health care reform will cover “taxpayer-funded abortion.”

It doesn’t. If you assume “abortion” means “termination of a pregnancy through drugs or surgery,” then the health care reform bill not only doesn’t have federal funds for this, but it includes provisions that make it extremely difficult for private funds to be used to cover abortion. The claim is beyond farcical. The only way it makes sense is to assume that conservatives have expanded the definition of “abortion” to mean not just contraception and not just women’s rights, but to mean any social spending they disapprove of.

It makes sense, from a political standpoint. On its own, health care reform is quite popular with the voting public. People want to curb the abuses of insurance companies, want to do something about the millions of Americans that are uninsured, and want some kind of cost controls on insurance. But if you can call health care reform “abortion,” then you can get people to quit thinking about how they’d like to have health insurance, and start getting them to think about how much they hate it when women can make their own sexual and life choices, as if they were men or something.

This is the result we get from media that are working on too short of a cycle (or are too cowardly) to check the veracity of claims emanating from the right, a world where the right can brazenly use the term “abortion,” and discussion about women’s health care in general, as scare tactics without much fear that they’ll face criticism from supposed fact-checking referees. Pro-choicers shouldn’t stand for it. We can demand a world where there’s no stigma attached to abortion itself, and where the word “abortion” isn’t used inaccurately to dredge up fears and hostility towards issues that don’t have anything at all to do with pregnancy termination.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2010/11/18/abortion-rights-multipurpose-scare-word/feed/6Where Have All the Pro-Choice Men Gone?http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2010/02/11/where-have-all-prochoice-men-gone/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=where-have-all-prochoice-men-gone
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2010/02/11/where-have-all-prochoice-men-gone/#commentsThu, 11 Feb 2010 22:35:06 +0000A recent Gallup Poll found that fewer men identify as pro-choice today than they did in 2008. The sexism that's feeding the anti-choice side and why we need men to support women's reproductive rights.

]]>The Daily Beast has an interesting column by Hugh Ryan on men in the abortion debate. Ryan notes that "A 2009 Gallup poll found that only 39% of men identified as pro-choice—a drastic 10 percent decrease from 2008." He also notes how much more willing men on the anti-choice side seem to be about voicing their opposition to abortion than men on the other, pro-choice side. Pro-choice men see it as a women’s issue, and therefore not really their place, while anti-choice men see it a religious issue. On this point I agree with Ryan, though I would go further on the anti-choice side and say that
these men are more vocal in their opposition because of male privilege,
which is fueled by religion. These aren’t synonymous so much as
complimentary. The Christian doctrine that informs and fuels the
anti-choice side has more than its fair share of sexism, from
reinforcing the traditional male-female binary and opposing women
behaving as anything more than accents to their husbands. This segues
seamlessly to opposition of abortion, since women aren’t supposed to
rule their own lives. However, I have to believe that, while
Christianity provides a worthy script for this sexism, that what is
really influencing men’s participation as vocal anti-choicers is the
male power dynamic that also finds such a cozy home in Christianity.
It’s this same power play that puts Viagara on insurance policies and
not birth control, and the same one that has gendered terms like whore
and slut as being necessarily female (hence the need for the ‘male’ in
front of slut to describe the man that had sex with the woman).
Furthermore, by placing the heart of male anti-choice sentiment with
male privilege, it gives more space to the crucial pro-choice religious
community, like Catholics for Choice and Daniel Maguire’s Sacred Choices, which chronicles the pro-abortion elements of the 10 major world religions.

After reading Ryan’s post, however, the big question for me wasn’t so much why men are openly anti-choice as why so few men are openly pro-choice. This isn’t an issue that men will ever directly experience, but it’s still an issue they need to support. Just as gay rights needs straight
allies and civil rights needs white supporters, abortion rights need
men. If you know and love a woman then you should care about access to
abortion. Maybe we need to remember what feminists have been saying all
along, that women’s issues are human issues – family, agency, equality.
Denying the right to full reproductive health care shouldn’t be an
issue just for the unborn. It should be an issue of justice for the
half of the population that it directly effects, and therefore an issue
for everyone who trusts women.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2010/02/11/where-have-all-prochoice-men-gone/feed/161Would CBS air a pro-choice Super Bowl ad?http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2010/02/02/would-cbs-air-a-prochoice-super-bowl-ad/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=would-cbs-air-a-prochoice-super-bowl-ad
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2010/02/02/would-cbs-air-a-prochoice-super-bowl-ad/#commentsTue, 02 Feb 2010 12:24:35 +0000In deciding to air a Focus on the Family ad during the Super Bowl, CBS executives have effectively outed themselves as anti-choice and anti-woman.

In deciding to air a Focus on the Family ad during the Super Bowl, CBS executives have effectively outed themselves as anti-choice and anti-woman.

If CBS is trying to avoid controversial issues in Super Bowl commercials, I think it’s safe to say that they’ve failed miserably. Even putting aside the negative frenzy the ad has already caused, let’s remember that Focus on the Family is one of the most contentious, intolerant, and extreme organizations in existence.

Not to mention that reproductive rights is one of the most controversial and dividing issues of our time.

To approve an anti-choice spot and reject an ad for a male dating site (among their past rejections of progressive organizations) shows blatant hypocrisy and bias.

We can’t show two guys making out, but we can talk about abortion?

Defenders of CBS’ decision say yes—that despite its divisive and political message, the ad itself is positive and ncontroversial. Bill O’Reilly asks, how can anyone be offended about Tim Tebow being alive?

But now I have to ask: What if a pro-choice ad had been submitted for the Super Bowl? What if it featured an uplifting story like Tim Tebow’s?

Picture this:Fade in. Moving music plays.Video of children playing.
A woman talks about how happy she is that the birth control pill was available to her. She wanted to make sure she became a mother when she was ready. Because of her ability to make that choice, she now has two children who she’s fully able to support. End on picture of happy family. Fade out.

And what if this ad was for Planned Parenthood or National Abortion Federation? Something tells me CBS wouldn’t approve their message to over 100 million Super Bowl viewers. And I don’t think Bill O’Reilly would deem this a "positive message."

It seems both are making this decision solely based on the ad—not its message, political connotation, or extremely divisive views of the creating organization.